Listen, Michael Cohen is severely fucked and the latest series of revelations about his Delaware shell company, the aptly named “Essential Consultants LLC”, seem to suggest that we haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of figuring out what exactly his duties as a “fixer” for Donald Trump entailed.

As it turns out, Michael Avenatti is not a guy with whom one wants to fuck, a characterization that, in case it wasn’t clear enough headed into the week, became crystal on Monday evening, when he released a document online that exposed multiple payments to Cohen’s company including a half million dollars from Putin-linked Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

Now, everyone listed in that document is scrambling around to try and explain exactly why they wired a shit load of money to a shell company that, among other things, was used to payoff a goddamn porn star who (allegedly) spanked the President of the United States with a magazine, before fucking him while watching Shark Week.

Of course there’s no way of knowing what the money was used for and I guess that’s the point. For its part, AT&T had this to say on Tuesday evening regarding why it paid Cohen’s company $200,000:

Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration. They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.

Ok. And now Novartis – which the document revealed made payments to Essential Consulting totaling $1.2 million, is out trying to explain themselves. Here’s what they came up with, as communicated to Bloomberg in an e-mail:

Novartis determined that Michael Cohen and Essential Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to U.S. health-care policy matters and the decision was taken not to engage further.

As the contract unfortunately could only be terminated for cause, payments continued to be made until the contract expired by its own terms in February 2018.

In other words, Cohen screwed them out of $1.2 million, which they were contractually obliged to pay in monthly installments of $100,000 until the contract expired. Got it. Sounds like something he would do.

Again, all of these excuses and belabored attempts to un-embarrass themselves after being publicly linked to a shell company that pays off porn stars for a sitting U.S. President, raise more questions than they answer.

What, for instance, are “insights”? What kind of “essential consulting” was Cohen providing? How did these companies learn about Cohen’s “essential” services in the first place? Where did that money go? What was it spent on? And on, and on, and on.

For now, the punchline (and you can be sure they’ll be no shortage of punchlines later on down the road as these revelations continue to be made public) comes from Avenatti himself, who sarcastically bemoaned the fact that, by virtue of being “just a lawyer”, he can’t possibly be expected to divine what it is a renaissance man like Cohen might have been up to:

Unfortunately, I am just a lawyer. Michael Cohen evidently is a lawyer, a real estate agent, an accountant, a doctor, a business consultant and a venture capitalist. Who knew that Michael Cohen would be exposed as the Leonardo da Vinci of our time?

Looking like Michael Cohen was a bag man collecting some bribes for his boss. Gonna be interesting to see just how fucking deep this rabbit hole goes. Pick a number, any number, then double it. That’s probably still not going to be enough. Western terminus of the money train from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine seems to be in a station right inside Trump Tower.

Writing about a subject is the best
way to educate yourself about it, and when I flick through past work I remember how much
they taught me, if no one else. Mainly they taught me that I didn’t know very much. But they
also taught me that most other people didn’t know much either. Thus, some key themes
which stand out include the illusory control of policy makers, the presumed knowledge of
those looking to them to actively do good, the ease with which we fool ourselves, and how
best to protect capital in the face of such unavoidable uncertainty. -- Dylan Grice